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A good rule of thumb

If it sounds too good to be true, someone's going to print it anyway. Peggy Noonan commented on The New Republic getting snookered by Scott Thomas Beauchamp (pseud. Scott Thomas, author of "Shock Troops" his diaries) in the week-end edition of WSJ. She says she smelled a rat early on, as she did when TNR published the Young Republicans piece by Stephen Glass in 1997. OK. Hindsight. But apparently there was an actual investigation and nothing he wrote--places, people, events--checked out. TNR begged him to confirm, but he's abandoned them, just as he did his fellow servicemen. Now TNR is getting all rathered. According to the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz

"The soldier whose New Republic article about military cruelty in Iraq was labeled false by Army investigators refused to defend his accusations when questioned by the magazine, even after being told that the editors could no longer support him unless he cooperated.

In a recorded Sept. 6 conversation, the writer, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, said from Iraq that the controversy had "spun out of control" and had become "insane" and "ridiculous" and concluded: "I'm not going to talk to anyone about anything."

TNR has pulled his comments from the web, so I couldn't check it. Even Wikipedia, which I don't usually check because it is written by biased users, is blocking any further editing of the story, waiting for some confirmation.

Michael Yon, one of the best known journalist/photographers of the Iraq War wrote on Oct. 25

I was in Iraq when it first hit the stands and someone asked me about the plausibility of the events described in the article. I skimmed the story but it did not even pass a simple sniff-test. With a shooting war going on, there is no time for trivial pursuits, so my only comment was something like, “It sounds like a bunch of garbage.” Turned out it was.

Someone at TNR needs the journalist's version of gaydar. But it's just more sad evidence of how desperately the left wants the U.S. to lose this war. They say they just want the truth; no, this story will never go away. If the Dems won't cut the funding or set a deadline, the media will just lie. Fellas, war is hell; people die and those who don't do awful things. Young people have their lives changed forever, if they survive. Let's not make it worse than it is.